When the scheme first got started, it seemed to be no big deal, really. By then there wasn't anything to protect and after the first time as part of the boarding house service there wasn't that much to be embarrassed about either.
My family came to Asheville when I was just ten. For me, it was an improvement over the dreary coal mining towns of western Pennsylvania. Asheville was a boomtown nestled in a bowl of mountains made up of the Blue Ridge Mountains running up against the Great Smokies. The railroad had been cut through the mountains thirty years earlier. It went through Asheville, already popular with the rich plantation families of the Carolina coast as a summer retreat from heat and mosquitoes and also because of its reputation as a healthy mountain environment for the cure of such diseases as tuberculosis, consumption, and melancholy. With the appearance of the railroad came summer visitors from much further away, including the superrich. Most notable of these was George Vanderbilt, who, as I was growing up, was constructing his premier American palace, Biltmore, in the hills just south of the city.
Construction was frenzied and mammoth, and business of all types was more than good. To accommodate both the summer visitors and the labor pouring into the city, boarding houses, renting rooms and two meals for a dollar a day, sprang up throughout the expanding city.
It was the cure that brought my family to Asheville in 1909, my father's death in early 1917 that turned our house into a boarding house, and my mother's own passing in the Spanish Flu epidemic in late 1918, that erased my dreams and turned me into a whore.
But that's not true, really. I won't whitewash my mother just to give her rest in her grave. I was a whore when she died. It was on me that I let men take me; it was on my mother that money was taken for it—and that it became a way of life, a replacement for what I wanted in life.
At eighteen, life was looking bright and full of possibilities for me. We had moved to Asheville because my father had contracted something in the mines, and he was told he needed to move to the mountains, somewhere with good sanatorium facilities if he wanted to live for any length of time. He didn't carve out coal below the surface; he owned the mine. But he was a close-supervision sort of owner. He constantly went underground to spur his miners on and to maximize production. And the black lung disease felled him just as quickly as it did any of the miners.
My father, Horace Bairr—yes, with two "Rs" we constantly were telling everyone—had the means to escape the black-walled channels with their bitter, choking coal dust. He brought his family—just me and my mother—to Asheville, and had a good-sized wooden Victorian manse built in the newly establishing Montford district to the northwest of the city, where many working-class people were settling within walking distance of their shops in the city center. My father was more comfortable around the middle class, he said, than with the wealthier people building their summer homes on the mountainsides surrounding and looking down in Asheville.
My mother disdained the move—and my father, for that matter. She was from the Philadelphia mainline. And she would have built up in Grove Park if my father had a notion to listen to her—which he didn't. But my mother was the half of the couple with a hardnosed sense for business. Away from Pennsylvania, my father allowed the assets of the mine to shift through his fingers and into the pockets of various unscrupulous relatives.
Although the relations between my parents were formally cordial, I would have to say they were icy cordial on my mother's part. Not that she treated my father much different from how she treated anyone else—including me. With me, there always was a reserve of sorts, and an air of sufferance of some sort of burden that I was the living symbol of. My parents didn't sleep in the same bed—or bedroom. And often, not in the same house. And they never had sex to my knowledge—never. My father never raised a voice or a hand to my mother, and he indulged her in everything that he was capable of doing. But it seemed more from a respect for her gender and that she had married him and darned his socks than from a deep passion—or even particular affection. And in the brief time he was with us in Asheville, he was away on business quite a bit. Only in later years did I know how hard he must have worked to keep the family's finances afloat—or the sacrifice he made to pretend we were a family.
When my father died in the back bedroom of our Montford house, taken finally by the hardening of his lungs in a wheezing bout of trying to suck in air that no longer had anyplace to go inside his body, my mother immediately used all of the savings left to them to add a bedroom wing, upstairs and down, to the back of our house, and opened it as a boarding house. The construction took an amazing short time of three months, but also an amazingly larger sum of money than my mother had figured. The construction boom was so healthy in Asheville at the time that she had to pay top dollar for materials and laborers.
My mother's failing—if you discounted avariciousness and a propensity to look the other way when it suited her pocketbook—was her pride. I always thought that upon my father's death she could have fallen back on the good graces of her family in Philadelphia. But when she died and I had to inform her relatives that she had, I found that they didn't even know my father had died or that my mother had had to go into business for herself to try to salvage the family fortunes. They had, however, told her that she was marrying below herself and that her union with Horace would come to no good. And she, no doubt, hadn't told them of her straits after he died so that she didn't have to see them gloat.
I believe she was right in that, because when I told them, plenty of gloating started—which was only wiped off their faces when I told them what my father had whispered to me in his last week of life and that my mother reluctantly then admitted to me—that my mother hadn't much choice marrying my father; that she was pregnant at the time, and he was the only one knowing that she was who would have her.
The irony was that I, a sandy blond, blue-eyed child of slim build and slightly underaveraged height, loved my roly-poly, dark-haired, brown-eyed, large-framed father who wasn't really my father a far sight more than I did the raven-haired woman who really was my mother.
But I mustn't be bitter. My mother gave me life—more than once—in addition to having ruined, at least for a while, the life I had.
When my father died and after my mother had thrown up her bedroom wing and opened her boarding house, and only then, did she realize she couldn't handle it all herself. She hired help, but help cost money. A son's help didn't.
At the time I was off at a small Presbyterian liberal arts college, Lees-McRae College, in not-so-far-away Banner Elk, fully intending to begin a life in writing arts. The good people of Lees-McRae were well-meaning and progressive of mind, and they were as delighted that I intended to be a writer as I was and were prepared to do everything they could to help me do that. It was all I ever wanted to be. I wanted to write plays, mostly, and my fantasy was to tell of the plight of the coalminers in Pennsylvania. Later in life, I was halfway grateful my dreams had been crushed at this point, as by then I realized that a mine-owner's son had less than nothing worthwhile to say about the plight of men hacking at black-coal walls hundreds of feet below the ground.
But I was idealistic at that time—and open to anything new and mind-expanding. I started down a road of "other" choice, though, when I met Seth Evans. He had come to Lees-McRae from the far more sophisticated city of Winston-Salem down on the Piedmont. And he was open to anything new and mind-expanding too. And he was a poet. But his mind had already been expanded much more than mine had been. And it wasn't long before we were taking hikes in the mountains surrounding Banner Elk, our books of short stories and poetry tucked into our backpacks along with the bottle of local moonshine Seth always was able to come up with, and a blanket.
During that first fall, we hiked at least twice a week, which the administrators at Lees-McRae thought was a fine addition of physical exercise to mental stimulation. I loved the poetry—at least what Seth picked out to read to me. He had a good speaking voice and was quite active in the college theater—an interest he was developing in me, saying I couldn't really write plays without having experienced the role of the actor on stage. He was also handsome of face, with dark, curly hair and long eyelashes, and a firm, trim body. The poetry he brought became increasingly explicit and the bottle of local brandy he brought became increasingly full going up the hill and empty going back down.
We started with petting and tentative kisses. The broadest plateau in our relationship was the month of the hand job, where we each slow-pumped the other off while reciting memorable, then, not-so-memorable-later, love poems to each other. There was just that once, though, before my mother called me home, that he managed, through the combination of poetry, brandy, fondling, and my first blow job, to get his dick inside my nether channel.
